stay together. They went to the same high school and had been sweethearts since freshman year. But Cathy was sent to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp, while Sperry was sent to other side of the country at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California to get ready to go to war.
“I was into playing video war games at the time,” he tells me as we talk, seated around the dining table of their home. “I wanted to kick in doors. My dad was mad about it. He thought I was throwing away a chance at doing something in golf to join the Marines.”
While Sperry had been working out for months prior getting physically ready for Marine boot camp, he conceded he wasn’t mentally ready for what the next thirteen weeks would bring. For the first three days of boot camp he felt like he was on his feet the entire time. He stood in line to get his head shaved. That first cut that made everyone the same. Then everything went to overload. The exercises they made him do pushed him beyond the endurance level of anything he had ever done before. When he was finally allowed to sleep for a few hours his body hit his rack like a rag doll, barely moving throughout the night. The mornings were like waking up in hell, the yelling, the racing to the bathrooms with some poor bastards getting too nervous to piss with the impatient lines behind them.
They could never sit; they had to either stand or squat. They would squat while cleaning their weapons until their haunches ached and finally cramped up. But they weren’t denied water; in fact it was the cruel opposite. They’d have to drink so much water, chug it right down, sometimes until they puked, then they’d have to drink some more. If you screwed up, Sperry recalled, you’d find yourself doing IT, or intensive training, one-on-one with the drill instructor. This was not where you wanted to be.
After a few weeks in, Sperry felt the shock of boot camp wearing off. He no longer felt lost. He stayed out of the drill instructors’ firing lines, pushed himself hard and did what he could to help the others in his training unit. Some guys were beyond help, the mentally unstable who could hold it together through the recruiting process with the assistance of overzealous recruiting officers but quickly unraveled in boot camp. They would be dazed or paralyzed by the orders and shouting. Others would lose it altogether, Sperry said, even try to fight their own drill instructors, which was never a good idea.
“The thing that got me through,” says Sperry, “is that I wanted my parents to see that I could do something on my own. I didn’t want to live inside the bubble of Illinois. I wanted to be a Marine too much to not finish. I knew there would be life after boot camp.”
And there was. Being a bit bigger and taller than some of the other Marines, Sperry was trained as a SAW gunner, tasked with carrying the Belgium-made M249, a gas-powered, air-cooled, $4,000, 15-pound rifle capable of delivering 750–1,000 rounds per minute. The M249 fired 5.56 x 45 NATO rounds with the accuracy of a regular rifle but with the rapid rate of fire of a machine gun. It was the center of gravity for a four-man Marine fireteam, which was built around maneuvering, protecting and utilizing its awesome firepower. The weapon provided the kind of head-bending covering fire that could keep a unit alive until they were reinforced or extricated. Despite its weight, with an added 6 pounds from a 200-round ammo box, Sperry was proud to carry it.
After boot camp, Sperry was part of one of the last waves of new Marines to join the platoon he would deploy with to Iraq within two short months, the 3rd Platoon, India Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. When Sperry finished basic and joined his platoon at another part of Camp Pendleton, the unit cohesion was already in full and ridiculous force. Guys, Sperry recalls, were strutting down a makeshift catwalk wearing boxers and body armor, one wearing nothing but camouflage paint and a canteen. It was typical Marine behavior. Despite being just weeks away from deployment to Iraq, the platoon was holding a combat fashion show, laughing in the face of the danger the entire battalion would soon face. This was, Sperry felt, exactly where he belonged.
A week before Operation Phantom Fury was set to begin, Sperry’s platoon moved to an abandoned house inside the perimeter of Camp Abu Ghraib, where the rest of 3/1 was based.
Here they began an endless cycle of combat drills: entering and clearing houses, the most efficient way to remove glass from a window frame using the muzzle of an M16, how to retrieve a wounded comrade from an area with no protective cover. And then there was the checking and rechecking of gear. When someone in the platoon misplaced a thermal scope, their sergeant kept them up all night looking for it even though they were slated to move to their fighting positions just outside Fallujah the next day. It was during this countdown to the battle, Sperry says, when some Marines started suffering from unusual injuries as possible excuses to get out of fighting, like the lance corporal who accidentally shot himself in the foot with the SAW three times. Another in the unit had a sudden attack of “amnesia” after a roadside bomb incident that left him physically intact. “Where am I? Is this a gun in my hand?” Sperry imitates the Marine, shaking his head disapprovingly. There was a small respite during this period of intense training and prep for the big push when Kilo Company commandeered a passing meat truck while on patrol. It yielded enough steaks and ribs to feed hundreds of young Marines tired of T-rats and hungry for fresh meat.[13]
“It felt like the Last Supper,” says Sperry, recalling the moment in a somewhat wistful way. Indeed, he had reason to be. At just nineteen years old he had already killed nine people in combat, lost one of his best friends and was about to go into the biggest fight of his life.
Before any battle, U.S. forces receive from the commanders the ROE orders, or rules of engagement. In this case they were given, according to Sperry, in what would be considered an unorthodox way, by a junior officer, a lieutenant from headquarters. A person none of the men recognized.
“We were basically told it was a free-fire zone,” Sperry tells me. “If anything moved you were allowed to shoot it.” These orders, if true, are likely the reason that Marines, during at least three reported incidents (including the execution I witnessed), killed the prisoners they had captured, a violation of rules for prisoner treatment outlined in the Geneva Conventions.
Sperry also remembers an assembly before the battle where three-star lieutenant general James Mattis, the hard-charging, sometimes profane Marine Expeditionary Force commander, told his men that this was going to be the biggest U.S. urban military battle since the Marines fought house-to-house to dislodge five thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops from Hue City during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
“What we’re doing now,” he remembers Mattis saying, “will be written in your child’s textbooks.”
Some Marines used the final hours before pushing out to write letters to their families, instructing their comrades to retrieve them under their flak jackets if they were to fall. Sperry was not one of them. “I didn’t even want to think about that or talk about it,” he says.
At the company level the battle plan was for Kilo Company to push the insurgents south and for India Company to flank them in a pincer movement and simply kill them. It would, like Hue City, be house-to-house fighting with plans, Sperry was told, to clear every single house. In reality, the Marines would not go into a house until they had contact, meaning someone was shooting at them. At three A.M. on November 8, 2004, India Company moved to its fighting position north of the Fallujah railway station. They were “welcomed” to the area with an insurgent round fired from an RPG, which hit one of the trucks but didn’t explode.
The men dug protective trenches around their vehicles and slept, exhausted, for much of the next day and night as jets and artillery began softening up the city for the ground assault to come.
When the order finally came to move, Sperry was surprised at how empty the city was. It seemed to him like a ghost town. At first, as the Marines entered, they found no insurgents but fully loaded weapons staged behind walls and other tactical locations. Sperry picked up an AK-47 lying on the ground, stripped off its banana clip and ejected the 7.62 round already in the chamber before dropping it back down. “Dumbass,” someone yelled at him, “that coulda been booby-trapped.”
While the Marines of Sperry’s 3rd Platoon still couldn’t see them, the insurgents let them know they hadn’t completely left town. Lance Corporal Jody Perrite got hit with a sniper round in his right arm, which entered right below his Marine bulldog tattoo and exited on the other side. Other Marines started getting picked off too. The insurgents were prepared and knew the terrain. They used low-tech improvisational tactics to safeguard their firing positions, like scattering shards of broken lightbulbs on the concrete stairways leading to the rooftops where they were hiding. That way when the Marines moved in they’d hear them coming. The confusion and uncertainty of combat also gave way to comic moments. As Sperry and his squad moved up the stairway of one house, the squad lined up outside a closed door made from corrugated aluminum. Believing there were insurgents on the rooftop, the Marine in front, carrying a shotgun, wound up and stomp-kicked the door, center-mass. Instead of caving in, it reverberated like a cymbal back on the kicker in a loud twang. The Marines laughed, knowing that any element of surprise was just lost with their clumsy entrance. The rooftop was clear, but the Marines started taking fire from
